largely disappeared. After too many
years of undiscernment that truth was apparent to me. And even so, it
was but a gradual enlightenment; even now it is unlikely that I
appreciate the facts in their deepest significance. For the "robust"
tradition, as I have just called it, was something more than simply
robust. It was older, by far, than this anomalous village. Imported into
the valley--if my surmise is correct--by squatters two centuries ago, it
was already old even then; it already had centuries of experience behind
it; and though it very likely had lost much in that removal, still it
was a genuine off-shoot of the home-made or "folk" civilization of the
South of England. No wonder that its survivals had struck me as
venerable and pleasant, when there was so much vigorous English life
behind them, derived perhaps from so many fair English counties.

The perception came to me only just in time, for to-day the
opportunities of further observation occur but rarely. The old life is
being swiftly obliterated. The valley is passing out of the hands of its
former inhabitants. They are being crowded into corners, and are
becoming as aliens in their own home; they are receding before newcomers
with new ideas, and, greatest change of all, they are yielding to the
dominion of new ideas themselves. At present, therefore, the cottagers
are a most heterogeneous population, presenting all sorts of baffling
problems to those who have to deal with them, as the schoolmaster and
the sanitary officer and others find. In no two families--hardly in two
members of the same family--do the old traditions survive in equal
degree. A lath-and-plaster partition may separate people who are half a
century asunder in civilization, and on the same bench at school may be
found side by side two children who come from homes, the one worthy of
King George III.'s time, the other not unworthy of King George V.'s. But
the changes which will remove the greatest of these discrepancies are
proceeding very fast; in another ten years' time there will be not much
left of the traditional life whose crumbling away I have been witnessing
during the twenty years that are gone.

Some grounds of hope--great hope, too--which begin at last to appear,
and are treated of in the final chapter of this book, save the tale of
Change in the Village from being quite a tragedy, yet still it is a
melancholy tale. I have dealt with it in the two sections called
respectively "The